Envelopes of unitary construction for mailing letters, invitations, and the like using part of the envelope surface for the name and address of the recipient are well known. However, these envelopes generally have a number of disadvantages.
First, the envelopes generally tend to have a very plain appearance, suitable mainly for everyday or routine business use. In most cases, the envelope is monochromatic and has a very plain and ordinary surface on the outside of the envelope for placing the name and address of the intended recipient. The flap used to close the envelope also is very plain and ordinary, normally with straight edges and a generally rectangular or triangular shape.
While high quality, custom-made envelopes with engraved designs, colored papers or other decorative features are available, they tend to be very expensive. Moreover, once a custom envelope is made, the design generally cannot be changed, without placing another order for a different design with the attendant additional expense and extra volume of envelopes to store.
Most envelopes, whether of the mass produced or custom-made variety, are normally pre-assembled by the manufacturer and sold to users in an “as-is” condition. They are not intended to be rearranged or altered by the user in order to vary the appearance of the envelope or its intended function. Moreover, such envelopes are generally designed to have just one function, namely, to loosely hold a letter or other item inside the envelope until it is received, and thereafter to be discarded by the recipient after the envelope is opened and the contents removed.
Such conventional envelopes are not ideally suited for mailing photographs. When a photograph is simply included in a conventional envelope along with a letter, for example, it may become separated from the envelope and misplaced once the envelope is opened by the recipient. In addition, the recipient who desires to display the photograph after its receipt, generally needs to supply a separate frame in order to do so. This can be unnecessarily expensive, especially when the recipient intends to display a large number of photos for only a relatively short period of time, such as is often the case with holiday photographs received as part of a holiday greeting. Specialty photo mailers are known, but they tend to be unattractive and awkward to use without a photograph inside. A recipient who receives a specialty photo mailer with no photograph inside is likely to believe that the photograph has been lost or accidentally omitted from the envelope. To avoid these embarrassing situations, the sender will generally keep two different kinds of envelopes on hand, conventional envelopes for mailing letters and photo mailers for mailing photos. Once again, this requires additional expense and storage capacity.
A need exists for a customizable envelope which provides a simple and effective means for storing or transporting a letter, invitation, postcard or photograph, and which enables the user to assemble the envelope in a variety of different ways in order to vary the appearance of the envelope or its intended function. Ideally, such an envelope would be relatively inexpensive to manufacture, but would be capable of possessing a very formal or decorative appearance on the outside of the envelope. It also would be multi-functional and would be particularly well-suited for use with photographs both as an envelope designed for protecting a photograph during passage through the mail, and also as a convenient and attractive picture frame and stand for displaying the photograph once the recipient has opened the envelope.
The present invention fulfills these and other needs.